Tales from the Semi-Super-Bloom Tour, Part 1: The Mojave Desert and El Paso Mountains

A lot of excitement has been generated this year with the plentiful precipitation in the California Desert and the resulting "Super-Bloom". Mrs. Geotripper and I didn't want to totally miss out on the sights, but we didn't want to be in the midst of crowds that we knew would be present in the places in the news like Anza Borrego or Lake Elsinore. So we zeroed in on the part of the California desert that hasn't been in the news: the Owens Valley and Death Valley National Park.

We knew from the start that we might not see a great many flowers because most of the storms had tracked more to the south, but there had still been considerable precipitation, just a bit later than other parts of the desert. So with proper expectations in place, we set out on the road a week ago. The nice thing about low expectations is that you have a good chance to be pleasantly surprised, and we were. It wasn't the 'super-bloom', but it was colorful enough, so we dubbed our journey the "Semi-Super-Bloom Tour".

 The first place that made us pull over was a non-descript road junction on Highway 14 near Jawbone Canyon and the El Paso Mountains in the Mojave Desert. There were lots of small flowers on the desert floor, including Goldfields, Phacelia, Mallows and small Lilies (I welcome and expect corrections on flower identification).

The desert floor where we were traveling has been largely given over to utilitarian uses. In the immediate vicinity there are airports, military bases, and solar arrays, as well as the towns of California City and Mojave. There isn't much wilderness in this part of the desert.

The landscape is geologically interesting, as we were paralleling the Garlock fault, which divides the Mojave Desert from the Sierra Nevada and the Basin and Range Province. The fault is active, with forty miles of left-lateral offset, but it hasn't produced any historical earthquakes of consequence. The potential certainly exists.

Although the fault motion is primarily lateral, some warping and deformation has lifted a mountain range on the north side of the fault, the El Paso Mountains. The mountains are composed largely of older Paleozoic metamorphic rocks. The rocks had been quite deep in the crust, but were brought to the surface and eroded, and by around 12-15 million years ago had been eroded to a fairly flat surface. This surface was eventually covered by terrestrial sediments deposited in alluvial fans, grassy plains and ephemeral lakes that would remind a person of the African savannah. The comparison is apt, because the sediments contain fossils of a diverse fauna that included ancient camels, horses, antelope, elephants, and a number of predators including to the forerunners to our modern cats and canines.

The valley floor where we stopped certainly had flowers, but we could see that a real super-bloom was underway on the slopes of the El Paso Mountains off to the north. The usually dull gray slopes were covered in places with a veritable rainbow of flowers that must have including a great many poppies and lupines.

Our highway turned north, crossed the Garlock fault, and entered Red Rock Canyon State Park, which preserves the Neogene sediments containing the fossils mentioned above. Millions of people have seen Red Rock Canyon, but not necessarily in person. The brightly colored cliffs have been used as the backdrop for hundreds of Hollywood movies (they were the cliffs of 'Snakewater', Montana in the opening scenes of the original Jurassic Park).

We found that many of the Joshua Trees were blooming. The trees are a defining characteristic of the Mojave Desert and are found primarily in east California and portions of Arizona and Nevada. The trees are a potential victim of global warming. Their seeds once were spread in the scat of giant ground sloths during the last ice age, but the sloths are gone, and with the increasing heat, the trees (actually lilies) are unable to propagate up slopes where they can thrive. Ironically, the trees may disappear entirely in the national park that is named after them.

We left Red Rock Canyon and headed north on Highway 395 towards our turnoff to Death Valley at Owens Lake. Along the way we could see that the "foothills" of the Sierra Nevada were also bathed in color. We were headed to Fossil Falls and Red Hill, hoping to see what had changed in the six weeks since we were last there. That will be the subject of our next post...

The Other California: Caught in the Vise (the Western Mojave Desert)

The western Mojave Desert is a little-known corner of California, except during the late winter and spring when parts of the desert come alive with Golden Poppies, Lupine, Goldfield, Cream Cup, and Desert Larkspur. Now, my readers know that I would NEVER stoop to thinking up some geology to talk about just so I could show some pictures of flowers from my trip through the area last week. So feel free to ignore any flowers that just happen to impose themselves between you and the very important mountains that make up the horizon of the pictures below.

The western Mojave is the relatively flat triangular region lying between the Garlock and San Andreas faults (see the NASA image above). The Garlock is a fault that few Californians hear about. It has not produced a major earthquake in perhaps a thousand years, with the largest historical quake being a 5.7 magnitude event in 1992. It is thought capable of producing much larger tremors, as high as magnitude 7.6 . The Garlock is a left lateral fault (the side opposite the observer moves to the left) that has shifted as much 40 miles.

In the picture above, the Garlock fault lies at the base of the Tehachapi and El Paso Mountains in the far distance. The Tehachapis are composed of granite and metamorphic rocks, and make up the southern "toe" of the Sierra Nevada. 4,000 foot high Tehachapi Pass (below) is a major transportation corridor between northern and southern California, including the last railroad crossing over the Sierra Nevada for some 300 miles (the next crossing north is at Donner Pass near Lake Tahoe).

The more familiar San Andreas fault is the 600 mile long transform boundary that divides the North American plate from the Pacific Plate. It was been responsible for two of California's biggest earthquakes: the 1857 Fort Tejon quake and the 1906 San Francisco tragedy. The area southwest of the fault is moving northward about 2 inches a year, breaking loose in large earthquakes every two or three centuries. In the picture below, the San Andreas lies just over the ridge in the distance.

I wrote about the Antelope Valley California Poppy Reserve in a previous post, so I won't add much here other than to say that the low hills of the preserve provide a wonderful view of the landscape produced when two major fault systems converge on each other...especially in spring.

The Other California is my continuing series about the less familiar parts of the state that don't usually show up on the postcards. I am cheating just a little because poppies show up on almost ALL the postcards. And yes, the picture below is just simply a gratuitous flower picture...